What Does Elizabeth Smart’s Father Want Us to Know?

Earlier this year,  Jayme Cross, a 13-year-old girl had been missing for months after a 21-year-old man murdered her parents, duct-taped her wrists and mouth, threw her in the back of his trunk, and drove away. Some 88 days after being abducted, Jayme was able to get out of the house, and run to get help from a woman out walking her dog.

Perhaps few others have as clear of a perspective on this story than the family of Elizabeth Smart—the woman who was abducted for several months in Utah in 2002 at the age of 14.

At the 2015 Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Summit, Elizabeth Smart’s father, Ed Smart, gave a moving presentation about the way sexual exploitation and abuse is interlinked in real-life, and how to turn trauma into action. Ed Smart is now an advocate for child protection, working with numerous nonprofits and has lobbied Congress and the Senate tirelessly to prevent further abductions and to rescue missing children.

Resources:

First, you can go to http://www.childIDprogram.com/ for the ID Kit which allows parents to take and store their child's fingerprints in their own home. Keep for your own records in case the worst happens and you need to give them to authorities.

Surviving Parents Coalition

http://www.spcoalition.org/index.html

TAALK has many resources and a private forum with one section that is specifically for Parents of Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse: https://taalk.org/forum.html

https://elizabethsmartfoundation.org/ - ending victimization through prevention, recovery and advocacy